Module 3 Reflection
I have learned a lot through this week’s readings about attention and poverty. I found it to be very thought provoking. The idea of an attention economy is totally new to me. I think Lankshear and Knobel did a great job describing Michael Goldhaber’s idea of an attention economy. Our economy is based off of what is desired and what is scarce. Today, the amount of information available is overwhelming. In Lankshear and Knobel’s essay, they state that Goldhaber thought that attention is scarce because “each of us only have so much of it to give” (Lankshear & Noble, 2001, p.2). Attention can only come from humans, it can not come from media such as the internet like so much information comes from. I found the section on attention in schools to be particularly interesting since I want to be a teacher. According to the essay, children in schools who are seeking attention are often thought of as trouble makers while children who don’t pay attention are thought to have short attention spans (Lankshear & Noble, 2001, p.19). I can definitely see this in schools. So many children today are being diagnosed with ADD/ADHD because of attention difficulties. I would guess that many of these diagnoses are incorrect and that children are just not being engages in the information they are receiving.
Poverty is an issue that I hear about quite often these days. It is quite prevalent in our society. Out of 72 million children under age 18, 44% of them are low income (Jiang, Ekono, & Skinner, 2013, p.1). That is nearly half of all children under age 18. That really makes me sad to think about. Again, because I want to be a teacher, things about school stick out to me. It’s scary to think that nearly half of my future students will be part of low income families. According to the Children’s Defense Fund’s article , “Ending Childhood Poverty Now”, being hungry effects children’s ability to learn (2012). I want my students to be able to learn to the best of their ability and I hate to think that some children won’t be able to because they couldn’t afford to eat. My question is what can we do about this? Well according to the same article, we can start to better childhood poverty by providing more assistance (Children’s Defense Fund, 2012). We need to make sure that children’s basic needs are met. According to this article, some ways we can achieve this are to increase earned income tax credits, increase minimum wage, create more subsidized jobs, provide more affordable childcare, and help with housing costs to name a few (Children’s Defense Fund, 2012). I hope to see these ideas implemented so that children’s needs can be met.
I have actually seen the Global Food Disparity images before. I can’t recall which class it was in, but I believe a teacher in high school showed it to us and I want to say it was either economics or health. I remember being shocked at these images when I saw them the first time and I was just as shocked looking at them again this time. It doesn’t make me feel good when I look at the United States. We spend so much money on junk food that doesn’t supply us any nutritional value. This could be a way to help us with solving the hunger and poverty issues. We should be teaching people to spend their money on fresh food. You can find fresh produce for cheap at places like the .99 Store.
As we have learned, media tends to showcase white, middle and upper class males with perfect lives. Why would they want to show people living in poverty? According to the article, “Poverty’s Poor Show in the Media”, most of the times, poor people are only featured on the news if they are causing some type of disorder (Kuper, 2013, p.2). The media doesn’t think people will be entertained by this. This reminds me of how people of other races are only seen on the news if they have committed a crime or something of the like. This article also mentions that it is easier for journalists to attend a PR event at a hotel than to go into the “ghetto” to interview people (Kuper, 2013, p.2). Poverty is hardly shown in the news. According to the article, “The Poor Will Always be with Us: Just Not on TV News”, major news stations such as NBC, CBS, and ABC featured about 1 news story regarding poverty every 15 weeks (DeMause, 2007, p.2). The article continues to state that these news stations had more stories relating to just Michael Jackson alone than poverty (DeMause, 2007, p.2). Typically in the media, the poor are not depicted well. Media makes the poor invisible, they are only looked at as statistics, they are blamed and told it is their own life choices that made them poor, and they are depicted as being “down on their luck” (Ridgeway, p.1-3). The one that makes me the angriest is that media makes it seem like people are poor because of their life choices. I am sure that this is true for some people, however; I do not agree with this. Often news stations report about things like poor people using food stamps, but they don’t report on what the real reason people are using them for. I hope this is something people keep an eye out for.
My final thoughts are on media and violence. I was never allowed to play violent games growing up because not only did my mom just not like seeing them, but she also was afraid it would lead my brother and I to become violent. I have to admit that before I started to become more media literate, I would have thought violent games also would lead to violent behavior in children and teens. I still personally don’t like violent games, but I know they won’t cause children and teens to be violent. According to Sternheimer, as media culture has expanded, violent crime rates have actually declined (104). The numbers do not support the idea that media culture is causing children and teens to act violently. I get why people would believe this though.
